LONDON – The crucial difference between the dinosaurs and Britain’s ruling Conservative Party is that the dinosaurs had no way of knowing that the asteroid was coming. The signs of doom abound for the Conservative Party, with some opinion polls suggesting that the next general election could be an extinction-level event of catastrophic political loss. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has indicated his intention to hold an election in the second half of this year, and legally it could be held by January 2025 at the latest.
The party is trailing the opposition Labor Party by more than 20 points, and most experts predict that this election will bring an end to Conservative control. But will that spell the end for the Conservative Party for good?
MPs will have an early, albeit incomplete, indication of whether the Conservatives will support it. getterdamung Preparations are underway for Thursday when local elections will be held in England and Wales. The complex and diverse vote, which involves the election of thousands of local council seats, multiple local mayors and law enforcement officials, is unlikely to affect the composition of the UK parliament or pose a direct threat to Mr Sunak’s grip on power. do not have. But some Conservatives fear this could be the place where the dismantling of the world’s oldest running and most electorally successful political party begins.
“This is the first of two stages of the destruction of the Conservative Party,” one former Conservative cabinet minister told The Daily Beast. The second stage is the arrival of the general election. “People have completely switched off and lost their powers of persuasion. They have made up their minds and just want the nightmare to end.”
Even those who believe that reports of an impending political death for the Conservative Party are vastly exaggerated still expect the Conservative Party to be ousted in local elections on May 2nd, and that the Conservatives will win parliamentary seats. Some experts suggest we could lose as much as half of that.
Part of the problem is that the Conservatives did very well three years ago, when many of the seats currently being contested were last contested. “May 2021 was the day Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. Remember him?” Sir John Curtis, Britain’s leading political scientist and professor at the University of Strathclyde, told The Daily Beast. Ta. At the time, the Conservatives were well ahead of Labor in national opinion polls and had seen their support soar after the rollout of coronavirus vaccines. “It’s a whole, totally different world,” Curtis said. “So the problem facing the Conservatives is trying to preserve a good year against the backdrop of a 20-point lead in the polls.”
Another former Conservative Party minister told The Daily Beast, “Nationally, I think the Conservative Party will lose the midterm elections as expected,” and a current Conservative MP said, “We’re clearly going to lose.” Deaf,” he said. A race with 2021 success in mind.
He instead said an “interesting” aspect of next week’s election was the re-election bids for two incumbent Conservative mayors, Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in the Tees Valley in the north-east. He said it would be. Both politicians enjoy personal popularity locally, and some Tory MPs saw the poor performance in the election as a hard-to-ignore red flag about the intensity of sentiment against their party across the country. may be interpreted.
“If both of them resigned, there would be quite a bit of concern,” the Conservative MP said. “But I don’t know what Tory MPs will do about it.” With a general election potentially just months away, he said, “I don’t know if someone would actually try to do something completely crazy. He added that he was not convinced that there was. What they mean is a move to overthrow Mr Sunak and replace him with a new leader before the referendum. The ballot paper has arrived. “We’ll have to wait and see. You can never predict what your colleagues will do,” the lawmaker said. “That would be ridiculous.”
That’s really ridiculous. Since returning to power in 2010 after 13 years in opposition, the Conservative Party has treated Britain to at least five different prime ministers. Of these, only two parties (Prime Minister David Cameron and Boris Johnson) won decisive victories in national elections, but a third party (Prime Minister Theresa May) won decisive victories in elections without a clear majority. It required the support of another political party to emerge victorious and govern. Liz Truss, a country of 68 million people, has made the decision based on the 81,000-plus Conservative Party members who voted for her in the election held in the wake of Johnson’s scandal-filled ouster. He was appointed as a leader. And Mr Sunak, the fifth Conservative prime minister in just six years, came to power as the man widely seen as the man to quell the historic turmoil of Truss’s unprecedentedly short tenure in Downing Street. Because 193 people elected him.
Mr Curtis, a leading opinion pollster, estimated that Labor had a “99 per cent chance” of forming Britain’s next government in the general election. “The Conservative Party faces a considerable risk of suffering the worst result in modern parliamentary history,” Mr Curtis said. “But it may not be as bad as the Conservative Party’s fate in Canada.”
This is a reference to the disastrous performance of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada in 1993. After nine years in power, the PC lost all but two of its federal seats in one of the worst electoral defeats for a ruling party ever seen in the Western world. This disastrous defeat, which prompted the party’s eventual dissolution, may have led to some British The media is citing reports about the upcoming UK general election.
How bad could it be for Britain’s Conservative Party, if not total annihilation? Perhaps as bad as 1997, when John Major led the party to its worst defeat in a century? Some in the party seem to take comfort in the perception that the current Labor leader, Keir Starmer, is not as charismatic as his predecessor, Tony Blair, who won in a landslide in 1997. One former Conservative cabinet minister said: “Mother Teresa could not have defeated Blair.” But polls about Mr Sunak’s personal popularity paint a rather bleak picture for the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party faces another existential threat. It’s the Conservative Party itself. The party is riven by factional infighting, which is already causing major headaches for Mr Sunak. One coalition of five rebellious right-wing factions known as the “Five Families” gave him hell over immigration policy. Liz Truss launched a new ‘People’s Conservatives’ faction in February and immediately began attacking Mr Sunak’s policies, vowing to join the fight against ‘left-wing extremism’. Even if the Conservative Party avoids being wiped out in the general election, a crushing defeat could lead to severe factional divisions leading to a complete split in the Conservative Party.
Conservative MPs now have no choice but to wait and ponder their fate. There is no doubt that many people are already feeling at risk and wondering who is to blame for their current predicament.
“We’ve had eight years of chaos, total division, intellectual bankruptcy, breakdown in party discipline and MPs who have no idea how to behave,” said one former Conservative cabinet minister. “They think they’re important. And people now think they’re not.”
